


the hollow empire

by arbitrarily



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, F/F, F/M, Power Play, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-05 01:07:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13376889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Ada delays her return to Boston.





	the hollow empire

**Author's Note:**

> Literally nothing here is healthy, but it is all consensual. Spoilers apply big time for Season Four. I played around a bit with the timeline, but this fic basically runs parallel to the Season Four finale, in particular the last ten minutes and the passage of time between the conclusion of the Changretta plot and Tommy's election as Labour MP for Small Heath.
> 
> Additional content warnings: explicit sibling incest, under-negotiated kink, light dom/sub, face slapping, biting, choking, minor bloodplay, period-typical homophobia and misogyny and slurs, references to canon-typical violence, alcoholism, potential self-harm, PTSD, and the utter unhealthiness that goes with an intimate relationship with Tommy Shelby.

 

 

I can't stay, and I can't come back.  
THE NATIONAL

 

 

 

 

Tommy is drunk again. Ada shuts the door behind her. 

So it’s come to this, she thinks. She folds her arms over her chest. She is to serve as witness to Tommy’s ruin, the three months after the Changretta threat collected thusly: a sharp and pickled decline. 

The problem with the role of witness, she knows, is that it’s you they expect to testify. _How’s Tommy? What’s he done? What’s he done now?_ Nothing, is the short answer for it. He’s done nothing. He’s gone on holiday, a circuitous route that has led him here, near collapse, on his bedroom floor. 

She watches him attempt to sit up, the spectacle pathetic. His hand is shaking, gin spilling out of the glass over his hand. He hisses, and that’s when Ada notices the blood. 

“Jesus Christ,” she says, more to herself than to him. 

Ada has learned if Tommy is anything he is a storm she has taught herself to navigate around, or at her most self-destructive, straight through to the eye of it. Of him. She knows his ugliness as well as her own. But now, when Tommy drinks he cannot bring himself to stop, as if he is attempting to blur images only he can see. The drink leaves him even angrier, belligerent in a way Ada doesn’t recognize. A caged animal just now understanding his predicament, perhaps.

He finally looks at her, dimly, as if she could be anyone. As if maybe he wishes she was, anybody else. 

“Yeah, it’s me, Tom. Ada. Your sister? Remember me?” She peels her jacket off and drapes it over the untouched chair in the corner of the room. She rolls up her sleeves. “Frances called me,” she says. “Well, she called Polly, but I answered.” She doesn’t tell him how it took her a long beat to even place the name Frances, how her voice had sounded so faraway and different when delivered by telephone, without the uniform, the careful posturing and the deference, positioned always just out of frame in Tommy’s house. She thinks perhaps this woman, his maid, is the lone person he has left who knows Tommy anymore. The Tommy he has become. _You should best come, ma’am. Mr. Shelby isn’t right. He isn’t well. He wouldn’t have me tell of these things,_ and then she stopped. 

Ada stands over Tommy where he is crumpled against the heavy ornate foot of the bed. She’ll never understand it: why he and Grace wanted to live like exiled royalty. The rim of the glass bumps against his lip as he unsteadily tries to swallow more down. It’s like watching a man try to poison himself. She braces her hands on her hips. She was meant to return to Boston days ago, but it was Polly who suggested she stay. “There are two people in this world who can get through to Thomas Shelby. And I fear I will not be enough.”

“So this is your idea of going on holiday.”

He ignores her. He raises the glass again, more successful this time. Tommy drinks the way he does anything else: bull-headed and deliberate, eyes open and aware despite his lack of caution. As if he is tempting something from somewhere up on high to try him. He drinks like he thinks even this won’t touch him; all the more reason to come back for more. She imagines he fucks the same — without regard. 

She sighs. “Get up,” she says, exasperation already bleeding into her voice. Despite what Polly had said, Ada no longer knows what to do with Tommy when he’s like this. She prefers him bossy and demanding and, even when it’s a lie, in charge. In control. The Atlas who holds their world steady. 

“Get up,” she says again. She extends a hand to him. He bats it away, tries to clamber to his feet without her help. He reaches his feet and his full weight leans against her. He drops the empty glass to the floor and it breaks into three neat pieces. He stumbles forward, bodily into her, his bloodied hand catching at the collar of her dress. He grips tight enough to rip it. He’s too heavy for her. 

“Tommy. You need to pull it fucking together, yeah?” He doesn’t reply, but she can feel his blunt fingertips clumsily gripping at the back of her neck. She manages to hoist him up, their pace slow and halting, as she takes him away from the debris he has left behind in his room — broken glass and broken pictures frames, smeared bloody handprints left on the gleaming wood floor. She’s reminded of having done this before: her arms around him, struggling to carry his weight. The smell of his blood and her own fear. Collapsing together on the stairs, his skull cracked, her own panic full and noxious in her mouth as she took him to hospital. His hand gone limp in hers. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to forgive him for all he has put her through. How she’s been made to endure the quiet insult that he knows she will always return for him. 

As she drags Tommy to the bathroom, she spies Frances’s shadow at the end of the hall. What must that woman think of him. Of them. 

The light is too bright and unforgiving in the bathroom. It bounces off of pale mint green tile, white trimmings, modern and expensive. Ada catches her breath. Tommy slumps down against the wall, his hand grasping for a glass that isn’t there. 

Ada kneels over him, the floor cold beneath her stockings. She blots at his face with a wet washcloth, increasingly uncomfortable, as if what she has been made to witness here is too personal and intimate for her to bear. She takes one cut hand in hers at a time all the same, silent as she cleans his wounds. Dresses them. Tommy stinks of juniper, gin, his own old sweat. Male skin. She’s disgusted. The great Tommy Shelby, Christ. He tips his head back against the tiled wall and his throat bobs as he swallows repeatedly. 

“If you’re going to boot, so help me, Tommy.”

He shakes his head. And then he keeps shaking it, increasingly manic, his skull bouncing off the wall. A spike of fear drives through her as she watches him, unsure how to stop him. “Hey,” she says. She offers a steadying hand on his shoulder. He stills and his lips peels back from his teeth in a gruesome approximation of a smile. He either laughs or he has started to cry. She cannot tell. She is afraid. 

“He’s dead,” he says. “He’s dead and I’d done it to him. He’s dead.”

Ada doesn’t move, the fear overwhelming now. “Who is?”

Tommy only shakes his head again. He ducks his head as he mumbles something, a name perhaps, but she cannot hear him. She grabs ahold of his face in both her hands and lifts it to her. 

“Who is dead, Tommy?”

She does not recognize the name he gives her, caught in the slur of sound that leaves his mouth, and she feels near guilty at her own relief. She thinks he maybe means the war, but she doesn’t know for certain. Maybe that is all this life has been for Tommy — one long war, different battles fought along the way, the carnage still the same, be it Flanders or Birmingham or this very house.

“Alright then,” she whispers quietly. His face is still in her hands. “It’s alright then.”

She tries to get his sweat-soaked shirt off of him, but he refuses to cooperate with her. Limbs heavy, body unyielding. Trembling. Ada sits back on her heels, and it’s then she realizes it: he’s crying. “Tommy,” she says, too quiet. She rests her hands on his chest, and fucking hell, she hates him. She hates him so much. Still, she runs her fingers through his damp hair. She remains kneeling over him, her knees slipping and aching against the hard tile. Tommy’s arms circle her waist. He holds her to him as he cries, the sound muffled against her chest. 

Ada rests her cheek on the top of his head. “Whatever it is, it’s alright,” she lies. “I’m here. I’m here, Tommy. It’s alright.” A truth, a lie. 

He stops crying as suddenly as he started. She feels the shift, his body going tense under hers. He shoves her away, and she falls back from him. His face is contorted with anger, pale, his eyes still red-rimmed. 

“Get the fuck out,” he snarls. 

She stares back at him, stung despite herself. 

“Get the fuck out of my house,” he shouts at her. “Get out.”

Ada gets to her feet, graceless and furious. She’s torn a hole in the knee of her stockings, her skirt wrinkled. 

“Fuck you, Tommy. Fuck you.”

He nods his head, a closed-mouth poisonous grin warping his face. “I don’t want you here, Ada. Fuck off.” His voice is steady now, enough so to almost make her believe he has sobered up. 

“Fine. That’s what you want. It’s always what you want,” she spits out. “Drink yourself to death, dig your own fucking grave, what’s it even fucking matter, Tommy. You have no one. Is that how you want it? No one.”

“Yes.” He’s all teeth and too-bright eyes.

Ada does not know if she will ever be able to forgive him — for this, for each and every infraction he has committed against her, each his own actions have compelled her to commit. She is sure though that can’t be all that love is: a long line of debts, a question of what is owed, the empty promise that someday you might collect.

“We all waste so much love on you,” she says and then she’s gone.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada had arrived home from Boston with dread sticking hot inside of her, clinging to her ribs. Lifting with each breath in to catch in her throat. The air was thicker here, dirtier, and it made her miss Boston in a longing way she never could have predicted when Tommy had first sent her away. She had left as if exiled, the rest of the family imprisoned, Tommy serving as both their jailer and solicitor. 

She still feels as if she had cheated something then. A noose, maybe. Swapped out for another looser one, all the more dangerous for its permanence, placed around her neck by Tommy’s hand — the knot growing ever tighter. 

Tommy had sent a car to fetch her. Brand new, the driver waiting for her. He snapped to attention when he spotted her approach. 

“Mr. Shelby regrets he was unable to greet your arrival,” he said. He bowed slightly, as if to punctuate the unnecessary formality of it all.

“I’ll bet he does,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

The offices of Shelby Company Ltd. are quiet and frantic at the same time during Tommy’s three month absence. They settle into their own steady rhythm without Tommy there, driving them all along the edge of every cliff he calls opportunity. 

Arthur does well in this atmosphere of relative calm. Contained chaos. 

Only Ada and Polly treat Tommy’s empty office as their own, working at his desk despite Lizzie’s disapproval. And only Ada and Polly know that Tommy has come home. That he haunts that empty house like some spirits-soaked specter out of a lesser gothic novel.

Ada is signing off on the month’s ledgers, reviewing the invoices Michael sent from New York, when Arthur takes a seat on the other side of the desk. 

She arches an eyebrow but doesn’t look up from the pages before her. “Can I help you?” she asks. 

“Nah. ’s fine. Steady on.” She lifts her head at that. Arthur reformed still strikes her as nothing more than a ticking bomb. That’s not entirely fair, she knows, if only exhibited by his behavior these three months gone. 

“You have my attention,” she says, grinning when he does. She leans back in Tommy’s chair. 

“It suits you,” he tells her. 

“How’s that?”

“The office, the desk. The job. You do good work, Ada.”

“I try,” she says.

“It’s been nice. Having you about again.”

“Well, don’t go getting used to it,” she says, smiling wider. His own smile tells her that he is humoring her. That he knows as well as she does that she isn’t going anywhere without Tommy’s blessing.

Arthur’s face goes cagier then, his posture stiffer. “How is he then?” There it is: the real purpose for this conversation.

“He’s on holiday, Arthur.”

“Oh, sure, he is.” He says it as if he is willing to play along, but there is a genuine concern shining in his eyes. Arthur, she thinks, has not only gotten older, but softer. 

Ada lets herself slump back into the chair. She’s tired; lying seems like a pointless effort. She tilts her head back, lowers it on a sigh. “You know he doesn’t like people to see,” she trails off, unable to find the word she wishes to use, settles for, “him.”

Kindness suits Arthur better than she ever could have expected. “No. But then you’ve never been people to him, Ada.”

She does not think she likes what that means, even if Arthur did not intend it as an insult. “No?” she asks.

“Nah,” he says. “You’re Ada.”

 

 

 

 

 

After Ada left Tommy’s house, she let Polly tend to him. The next time she sees him is at the Shelby Company Ltd. offices, in his office, and he is as she has always known him: that severe face, eyes hidden by the glasses perched on his nose. Untouchable. 

He glances to her seated at his desk. “You’ve made yourself comfortable.”

“It’s a fine chair,” she says. She lifts her glass of whiskey to her mouth and hisses as she swallows. 

He yields no comment on his previous behavior, and Ada idly hopes it is because he cannot remember it. Polly had told her, one of the mornings she came home from Tommy’s, that Tommy sent her his apologies. Ada had scoffed. “He said no such thing,” she said, and Polly only smiled.

“No, but he should’ve. If only we could say such things into being.”

Tommy approaches the desk. He stands there over her, his hands in his pockets. “I’m well,” he says. “Thank you for asking.”

“Thank god,” she drawls. He does look better. Or, she should say, he looks the same as he always has. 

“I’m not drinking anymore,” he says as he grabs for the glass in her hands.

“Would you look at that,” she says, ceding the glass. “A man of his word.”

He finishes off the whiskey as he takes a seat across from her. He places the glass down noisily on the desk. He eyes the clutter that has accumulated between Polly and Ada’s joint occupation of his office, his distaste obvious. Ada bites down on a grin.

“Enough,” he says, as much to himself as to her. “It’s time I got back to work.”

“Alright then.” She pulls open his desk drawer and takes out a bottle of whiskey. She can feel his eyes on her as she pours. She deliberately takes her time. There’s a question hanging in the air, unasked, and everything inside of her is crying out to delay it. The things Tommy asks are always too much. There is no such thing as a simple request from him.

She takes a biting sip and lifts her eyes to him.”Well?”

“Well?”

Ada places the glass back down on the desk and waits for him to pick it up. He does.

He doesn’t drink from it yet. Instead, he considers her, over the rim. “It’s time I got back to work,” he says again. “And I think you should come stay with me.”

Ada blinks in surprise at him. “I need to get home, Tommy.”

“And you will. But for now, I think you should stay with me.”

“What about Polly?” It’s an easier question to ask than _why?_ Since Ada has been back, she has merely traveled back and forth between two equally quiet and empty homes, haunted by the living as much as the dead. 

Tommy frowns. “Pol’s fine,” he says. She assumes that is just another way for him to say he isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada does what is asked of her: she moves in to Tommy’s estate in the country. 

She had thought the property gratuitous when he had first purchased it, and that opinion has gone unchanged. She wanders through it at her leisure during her first days there as occupant rather than guest. Despite Tommy’s demand, disguised as it was as a request, that she live here, he is scarcely around. It’s a bit akin to staying in Bluebeard’s home, a haunted mansion, she thinks in her less charitable moments — which she finds are often. Frances refers to her as Mrs. Thorne with a meek deflection and deference as if she is doing Ada a favor by pretending not to know her as Ada Shelby. After her early curiosity fades, Ada keeps to his study in his absence, and the library. The room is as pristine and unused as a museum, the shelves generically stacked with unread books, and she skates her fingers over the unbroken spines. 

“These big houses, they breed contempt of the spirits,” Polly had whispered to her when Tommy had first brought them out to see the estate. To see the life he had worked so hard to build. 

Ada had smirked at her askance. “As if you’d wish to be poor again, Pol.”

“We were more sensible then, at the least.” Looking around at the assorted finery in the great room, the good whiskey instead of the swill they drank at the back offices or the early days at The Garrison, Tommy’s well-fit suit and his careful posture, lording over his domain, Ada had found she could not argue. 

The stateliness has remained, but the pride is gone. 

It is much like when Grace had first died all over again: Ada sees to Tommy’s son instead of her own.

She reads stories to Charlie from the books that litter his bedroom. They’re all fairy tales, and in those stories, events always occur in threes. Three tries until the lost girl finds a comfortable bed to rest her head. Three pairs of feet the prince tries before finding the slipper’s correct fit. Incantations whispered in threes, three nights the prince cannot sleep, three days they wander. Three chances the princess is afforded to escape. 

Ada whispers to Charlie each night she tucks him into bed. “You are good,” she tells him. “You will seek only goodness in this world. You will be kind. You have my love.” It becomes a benediction, the words whispered into the crown of his head, her lips passing over the featherlight strands of hair that brush across his forehead. In these moments, her heart aches and she misses Karl same as she would miss a limb. She is, she knows, missing a part of herself. The part of her that would never allow her to stay here, in Tommy’s house, leaving her son alone at his New England boarding school an ocean away. 

Karl writes her dutiful letters, no doubt instructed by his teachers, and in them he details his happiness to her. He likes the school, he tells her, paid for with Shelby money even if his name is Thorne. He has friends, he says, and they are kind and funny, and he has memorized each capital of each state in America. In reply, Ada reminds him to be good as well, but the fierce fear and faith that lights her words when delivered quietly to Charlie are absent. It is a post-script scrawl instead.

 

 

 

 

 

Lizzie is starting to show. She comes by to the house on a Sunday. Frances shows her into the parlor, and Ada meets her there. 

“Would you look at you,” Ada says, fond. She takes a seat and reaches for the tea Frances has brought them. “Tom’s out, if that’s who you’ve come for. Not that I don’t enjoy the company, mind. Bloody quiet out this way.”

Lizzie looks down at her hands, knotted together in her lap. “Where’s he gone to?”

Ada shakes her head. “Hell if I know. Pheasant hunting, London, a secret government plot. Christ only knows with him.”

Lizzie merely nods. She has not touched her tea and she looks to everything but Ada. 

“How long shall you stay here?” 

Ada is surprised by the question. She shrugs, but Lizzie still isn’t looking at her. Ada knows Tommy has put Lizzie, and their baby, up at a place of her own, but Lizzie still looks around the room with a covetous eye she thinks she has done better to guard from Ada. 

“He doesn’t,” and Lizzie pauses, her mouth cracking into a sad smile. “He doesn’t come to see me.”

“You know Tommy,” Ada tells her. And she knows that Lizzie does, or she should. She should teach herself now to know him, the real Thomas Shelby, and not the romanticized imagining of him she still carries in her head and her heart. “He fails often when it comes to the human touch.”

“I suppose I’m just unused to being one of his problems,” Lizzie says.

“If he tends to anything, it’s his problems. It’s a great honor,” Ada says, flat and amused. “Embrace it.”

Lizzie looks to Ada at last now. She looks to her as if Ada has become her problem, too.

 

 

 

 

 

“I want for you to stay through the election.”

She should have seen the command, no disguising it this time, coming.

When Tommy had told her and the rest of the family, Polly standing at his side, already in the know, his grand plans to run for Labour MP for Small Heath, Ada had sat silent, her arms crossed. She had not said a word until she found him alone in his office.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Ada, please. Have a seat.” He was so sanctimonious about it, clearly expecting this reaction of her. It only left her angrier.

She didn’t sit. She stood there, her hands braced on her hips, before his desk, glowering. “Is there any institution you have not set your mind to corrupting?”

He held his hands open and looked beseechingly up at her. “There was an opportunity, Ada. And I took it.”

She laughed, the sound harsh and incredulous. “It’s that easy for you. ‘Today I’ll run for office. Tomorrow I’ll explore fucking Amazonia with a brigade of foolhardy adventurers.’”

“Should that be the case,” he said, “take heart you would be left behind. There’s nothing foolhardy to be found in Ada Shelby.” His voice dripped with sarcastic mockery. She spun on her heel to leave.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” she repeated. 

Now, she laughs again. “You expect me to stick around and see this farce through to the finish?”

Tommy ignores her. “No one else knows the politics the way you do. You speak their language. You could teach me. I need you here for that.”

“Christ, Tommy.”

He leans forward across his desk. “This is our chance, Ada. This is real power. The halls of fucking government, and I could have a seat at the table. This is the legitimacy we have always wanted.

She hates how he speaks to her as a _we_ , as if they are a unit and the goals and the dreams he speaks of are her own. No, worse, still — he has gone and made them her own for her without her consent. There’s an allure to what he says though, and she hates that, too. Real power, an opportunity at real change. He knows the exact mark to try for with her. But she knows there is more to this than he tells them. Tommy is far from an idealist. 

“I have to return to Boston at some point.” She has already delayed her return for too long. What she does not say is: I want to return to Boston. Ada likes who she is in Boston. She likes the woman she had become in the distance traveled away from this family. Away from him.

“No, you don’t. Recall, I’m your boss.” He leans back into his chair. “Besides, we have Michael in New York now.”

“And I have Karl.”

She catches the quick, telling jerk of Tommy’s head. He had not accounted for her own son. “Bring him here then.”

“No.” It’s all she says, but her tone brokers no argument. On this, there will be no compromise. She had promised herself that once they had left: she would not bring him back. 

“No,” she says, softer now. “I won’t go and disrupt him.”

“He’s in school,” Tommy says, after a long, considering pause. “He does well there, you say? It would only be until the election.”

Ada sighs. They are no longer bargaining. Of course she stays.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada is pleased to discover she has a good mouth for politics. She is good at sitting across from a man and convincing him to work against his self-interest.

She has to teach Tommy the skill as well. That this, too, is a form of violence, though a more insidious, innately feminine strain of it. It’s the poison in the well, slowly turning someone against their own long-held beliefs. A conscience can be made malleable as clay, and that requires care and patience, not the fist to pummel it flat.

She tells Tommy all of this in one of their impromptu evening meetings. They meet in private in his study, in the late hours, when he has rolled his shirtsleeves and reached for the decanter and poured. Tommy has no interest in what she has to say. But it’s not just her, she doesn’t think. He’s bored. He’s bored of it all already and he hasn’t even won. That’s dangerous.

“I don’t know why you work this hard,” he says.

“Tommy — ”

“It’s sewn up. You know that much.”

And she does. She had erupted in fury at him when he had told her: the election was won for him already without a ballot cast. “Then why am I here?” she had said, exasperated with him. With the futility of it all, a proper analogy for the world as she had always known it. 

“You don’t even want to try for the illusion of legitimacy?” she asks him now. “It was you would told me this was our real shot. Then we treat it as such. You’ll need allies, Tommy. Backroom deals above everyone else’s reach can only take you so far.”

He points to her with his glass. “You’re wrong there, but.” He trails off abruptly. 

“Right about everything else?”

There’s that heavy sigh, that narrow-eyed study he does, looking at her. She’s never cared for that about Tommy, that near otherworldly way he has about him where he looks at you as if he can spy out not only hidden weaknesses but capabilities. Like he thinks he know you better than you know yourself. Over time, Ada has come to view it as little more than a parlor trick, a cut-rate magician’s closing act. There’s nothing truly to it, but rather Tommy grafting onto you the person he wants you to be, not who you really are. He only presents it to you as what he has seen, and you take it, because it’s Tommy, and because he makes you think this person he’s seen is who you should aspire to become. 

“If you want me to put you to work, I’ll put you to work. Go on and take my meeting with Jessie Eden tomorrow.”

So she does.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessie is just as Ada remembered her: intelligent and bright, too proud of everything she thinks she knows. 

“He sends his own sister as emissary.” Ada smirks only in reply, drumming her fingers on Jessie’s small kitchen table. Everything in her flat is small, cramped. It’s like a Dickensian visit to the past, Ada thinks, and then wonders silently to herself how any of them ever lived like this. 

“Tell it to me straight then,” Jessie says. “Is your brother genuine?”

Ada snorts. She pauses off of Jessie’s flinty but earnest expression, whatever acid comment she had to offer swallowed back down. “I could give you a line about him as a man of the people, come up from nothing in Small Heath to prosperity, but that’s not what people want of a politician, I don’t think. Not really. They want a man in control, who understands control. If Tommy's genuine about anything, it’s his devotion to that. And to his own self-interest. He will serve it well. It’s the purest thing about him.”

Jessie frowns. A woman serves for a greater conversational opponent than a man, Ada thinks, especially when the woman in question reminds her so much of her own past self. “He cares for you, I should say. Your family.”

Ada’s mouth twists. “Self-interest. He sees us each as extensions of himself.” She averts her eyes from Jessie, disliking the bald truth of the statement.

“Do you trust him?”

It takes too long for Ada to lift her gaze back up to meet Jessie’s. Of course she doesn’t trust him; she has trusted him with her life. There is no answer for a question like that, least of all to give Jessie. She is suddenly and immensely tired of all these women, wanting nothing more than to speak of, to understand, her brother. She wills her mouth to soften into a smile. “Enough of Tommy. Let us speak of kinder things,” she says.

Jessie shrugs a shoulder. “It’s what you came to discuss, wasn’t it? Besides, I can’t say we have much in common. Other than him.”

“What a gruesome thing to say,” Ada says, letting her voice match her mouth: soft, vaguely flirtatious. “We’re both women walking tall in a man’s world.”

“I care not to think of it as belonging to men, but rather that I am walking forth into a new world, for us all.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Jessie has fixed her eyes on Ada. No wonder Tommy likes her: she’s ruthless. There’s steel in her. Ada thinks she likes her, too.

“Did you find it difficult?” Jessie asks her.

“What?”

“Sacrificing such a core part of yourself to become the woman you are now.”

Ada laughs. She can tell an insult when she hears one. She’s been painfully aware of it herself since she met Jessie the first time, the gulf of wealth between them. But it’s more than that, and it’s just as Jessie said. Ada had been like her once. There is something prickling between the both of them Ada wants to label as attraction, but it’s met by an immediate flush of shame. How like Tommy of her — narcissistic and self-obsessed, drawn to the people that remind them of themselves.

Ada’s mouth feels cruel as it shapes a grin. “It’s all sacrifice, isn’t it? Just a holier way to describe survival, I should think.”

Ada rises to leave, drawing her heavy fur coat over her shoulders. She’s the finest looking thing in Jessie’s entire flat and she knows it. “You’re very naive. And someday you will find it too expensive a luxury to entertain.”

“I know more than you think.”

“Yes. I know you like to think that.” Ada slips her kid gloves back on and adjusts the collar of her coat. “Tommy’s speech is this Friday. I’ll see you and yours there.”

 

 

 

 

 

So Ada continues to lean into the role of political operator. She finds it yields comfortably under her weight and pressure, the job shaping around her into something she is good at. She has a mouth built for disappointments, and there is no bigger letdown than the stacked deck that is electioneering. 

If Tommy is impressed, he does not tell her. There’s a smug appreciation to him though, as if by being good at her job, good working for him, she has demonstrated something only he knew about her.

Initially, the men still treated her as if she was little more than Tommy’s gun moll. It was in nothing they said out loud — near-sighted as they might be, they knew better than that, knew that Tommy Shelby, though his interests and reputation might have traveled uptown and upstairs, a part of him would always remain based and bloodied — but it was in how they looked at her: doubtful, bored, a waste of their precious time.

She enjoyed disproving them. That thin disappointed mouth of hers and her carefully barbed words. Her ability to execute a shakedown of her own, leaving these men nervous and on edge, frightened by the scenario she has presented them with — one where they had no choice but to oblige.

 

 

 

 

 

“You’ve got a face for the papers, I’ll grant you that.” 

Thomas Shelby, OBE, his face in black and white print that stains her fingertips. She leaves her fingerprints smudged in the cleaner margins of the paper. Polly isn’t wrong, Ada supposes. Tommy’s natural severity is rendered that much starker and imposing in black and white. Unapproachable and unimpeachable. In print, he is all hard eyes and hollowed cheekbones, elegant rather than sepulchral. As if he truly is a part of that vaunted, elevated world of privilege he has worked so hard to reach. It’s the effort that would give him away; you can’t see that in the photograph.

Polly holds the paper back from her, still appraising. “You’re a handsome devil, aren’t you.” Ada scoffs. Both Tommy and Polly look to her as if they had forgotten she was sitting there.

“Sorry,” she says. “It was a reflex.” They return their attention to the papers, to Tommy’s face, and Ada rolls her eyes.

She glances down all the same at her copy of the paper. It’s a good piece, the interview even better than the picture, but it’s the picture that matters. She does not think she would call him handsome. Tommy has always struck her as more ghoulish than handsome, but that is perhaps more a product of proximity and history.

 

 

 

 

 

“You should come out to America, Tom. Visit me when I get back. You’d like it.”

They have been drinking into the evening and Ada has her head tipped back, her body curled in an overlarge leather easy chair. She had put a record on earlier, a mournful woman’s voice lilting over a minor key. The record has finished and they’re left with the steady scratch of static.

“I got what I need here,” he says. 

She snorts. “Far be it from Tommy Shelby to seek out anything anyone might classify as a bit of fun.”

Tommy almost smiles. He has that _heavy is the head that wears the crown_ look to his face, so she chuckles to herself.

“It’s like here,” she says, “but it isn’t. They like a self-made man. They do, in America. Always going on about bootstraps and the like.”

“And I’m a self-made man?”

“Of course. Who else could make Thomas Shelby but you.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. He twirls his glass in his grip, his body sprawled languid in his chair. 

“They love their gangsters, too, you know. Common fucking celebrities.”

“I think I have had my fill of the American gangster. I’m a politician now anyway, love.” Tommy must be veering into drunkenness, the warm safety afforded by the whiskey, to call her that.

“You’re going to get bored, Tommy.” He already is bored, she doesn’t say.

“I look forward to it — the successful man’s curse.”

“You’ve been successful. For a long time now.”

He doesn’t say anything at first, his eyes heavy-lidded, fixed on her but as if he isn’t seeing her. 

“Do you ever miss it?” he finally says. The record crackles. “The old days? Fucking Small Heath and — we had nothing, but we protected it like it was fucking everything.”

“We had more than that,” she says quietly. 

Another long pause stretches, companionable and comfortable. “This was the future I thought of, when I bought this pile of fucking bricks. Only, you were her.”

This place is haunted, she thinks. Go from here, she wants to say.

“I’m sorry,” she says instead.

 

 

 

 

 

The club is named Dionysus. “Subtle,” Ada says under her breath, but Tommy ignores her. 

They are meeting a potential ally of Tommy’s at a jazz club, mid-afternoon. It’s unlike Tommy’s usual haunts — less showy. Quiet, too; a lone man plucks out a tune at the piano. Tommy stands out like a sore thumb. Like any other congregant of the nouveau riche, Tommy flocks to the accessories and trappings that highlight a hard-fought accumulation of money. Gilt, excess. Noise.

This place, Dionysus, reminds Ada of the New York speakeasies she was ushered into at the end of a long night. Ada had liked those places, those visits to New York, a response that strikes her as contrary to the character and the person she wants to believe she can be. Not a Shelby, perhaps. 

“What’s his name again?” Tommy asks her as they approach the only occupied table.

“Hamilton,” she hisses out of the corner of her mouth, smiling at the man in question. She watches Tommy extend his hand to him and shake it. She exhales the breath she did not realize she was holding. 

There’s a darkened intimacy to the club she imagines would be present even when packed to the rafters on a Friday night. She sits quietly beside Tommy, attentive. Curious, despite herself. She’s never been present for the Tommy Shelby hustle of renown. Ada still pictures Tommy as the man, equal parts boyishly young and too old, brought back from France, put together wrong, and ready to fight anyone and everyone. He is still that man, but his appetite has grown more expensive and his suits fit him better, his death wish matured into an outright challenge. Go ahead and kill me. I dare you to try. That part of him has always been a lie. For a man courting death, he fights back too hard. 

“The infamous Thomas Shelby,” Mr. Hamilton says by way of greeting. Ada winces inwardly. Tommy affords him a tight-mouthed grin. 

“I’d offer you a mutually flattering title, but I’m afraid I knew nothing of you until my sister told me of you on the ride out.” 

Mr. Hamilton’s smile mirrors Tommy’s now. Ada resists the urge to roll her eyes. They keep this up, it’ll be drawn pistols and the cleaners mopping up spilled blood before the club opens that evening. 

The conversation continues apace. It’s less a discussion and more an escalation of tensions, two men too certain of their own ego, balancing that ahead of common sense. She knows this Mr. Hamilton has not only deep pockets but friends in the right places. He’s the wrong sort of man to have working against you. She had explained all of this to Tommy. Tommy charges ahead now though, damning with faint praise and leaning hard into male bluster and faintly disguised insult. He hates the idea of a man with power over him. He hates when Ada tells him: “That’s politics.”

“I’m told you have much to offer me, in the way of making inroads. But, see, Mr. Hamilton, I’m what’s known as a self-sufficient, a self-made man. Why rely on the help of another when you can do the work yourself?”

Ada shoots Tommy a quick look. She wants to tell him to stop, that the implication is enough, but she knows that wouldn’t hold any water for him. The implication is never enough, not for him. Not for their family. They never learned how to function inside subtlety and instead have lived out-sized, in bold print. The newspaper headline, the obituary.

“Mr. Shelby, you’re here because you can’t do the work yourself.”

“Is that so?” Tommy parries.

Ada leans in to interrupt, but Tommy’s hand is quick and bruising on her thigh beneath the table. She freezes. Then, she digs her fingernails into the back of his hand, smiles beatifically at Mr. Hamilton.

“My brother’s passion lets him race too many steps ahead of decorum.” Tommy’s grip tightens and so does hers, squeezing his hand now as if she could break his fingers. “Our interests align, Mr. Hamilton. It would be a shame for either of us to walk away without an accord.”

She knows: Tommy is lost when things are stable. He needs the precarious tilt. Neither will serve them here. He needs to remember how much he stands to lose. Mr. Hamilton winks at her.

“That it would be, ma’am.”

“You do not speak unless I wish it.” Tommy waits until they’re in the car to say it. They walked away with a deal, lessened in Tommy’s eyes because she played a role in it. He is breathing heavily through his nose. He slips his gloves over his hands, but she catches the reddened skin of the left, where she had gripped him raw and tight. 

“I don’t speak? You jeopardized everything in there, and for what?” she spits out, white-hot with anger and jangling nerves.

“It came out in our favor.”

“It was needless,” she seethes. She takes a ragged breath of her own. 

There is very little gravity at the center of an empire. It is always threatening to collapse in on itself. She thinks Tommy would be wise to know this, but Tommy has never been wise. He relies on that from others, their wisdom for him to ignore. He thinks primarily in large-scale violence — wielded machine guns, the blade across the throat, pummeled fists and raw flesh, change writ bright and undeniable in blood.

“Why am I even here?” she asks.

“You’re valuable to me,” he says. He says it like something she should be ashamed of. He starts the car. She can still feel the ghost of his hand, gripping her thigh.

 

 

 

 

 

“I don’t care for this habit,” Tommy says. He points at Ada’s defensive posture behind his desk, in his chair. In his study. Tommy puts great stock in the concept of ownership. The possessive. A long time ago, this was something she had hated about him. Maybe she still does.

She says nothing to him in reply, silently clocking his movements as he steps towards his desk. 

“I have a favor to ask of you.” Ada lifts her eyes to meet his.

“May I speak?” she asks, waspish. She’s still stung from their meeting with Mr. Hamilton, a fact that only infuriates her more. The way Tommy had looked at her, spoken to her, as if she was nothing more than one of his pawns. Despite still living under his roof, she had done well to avoid him. She continued to work to sell his name to people she knew would be better off without him.

“Of course you may speak, Ada.”

“I won’t be diminished by you, Tommy,” she says coldly. He frowns.

“Of course,” he says again.

“I won’t be disrespected.” Tommy is silent in reply, his mouth held tight in a line that mirrors her own. She feels something petty and mean-spirited rise up in her and she latches onto it. 

“So this favor of yours — will it require me to be stripped naked publicly again?” She watches him mull that over, same as he had mulled it over when she had told him initially of it. She had liked watching the indignity of it register over his face. The quiet shock of it, how he had to reorient his face to show nothing yet again. The apology that came after was both disingenuous and sincere at the same time. A means to yet another end. 

Now, he shakes his head. Dismissive. “You nurse your grudges well, Ada.”

“Yes. I do. I was taught well.” She does not mean by him, but rather, as a response to all he has done to her. The nuance escapes him. He’s on the verge of a laugh but lights a cigarette instead. 

“You’re still mad,” he says. He sighs, as if she is the one who is the burden.

“Yes, Tommy. I am. It was a humiliation. Everything you would have me endure is a humiliation.”

She can’t read his expression. He’s locked himself off. His eyes are dark though, and there’s a danger to be found in that. He's watching her, thinking.

And then, sudden and brisk, he takes his jacket off. He unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt. He disarms himself, the thunk of his gun, when he places it and the shoulder holster down on the desk. He continues to undress, impersonal, though he is still watching her. Waiting for her reaction. 

“What are you doing?” she asks. She doesn’t bother to hide her disgust or her alarm. 

“Strip search. Turnabout. Fair play.”

“It’s nowhere near the same,” she says. She crosses her arms over her chest and she watches him kick his shoes off. She watches the deliberate, quick way he undresses. As if fulfilling a duty demanded of him, by her. “You’re not funny,” she says.

“I’m hardly ever.” He drops his shorts and he is naked before her. He takes the cigarette from his mouth and he holds his arms wide and open.

A blush has risen to her face and she wills it away. With the same determination, she forces herself not to look away. She walks around the desk and leans her hip against it. She openly stares at him in a way she never has. Assessing. He’s all lean muscle still, though he has gone softer as he has aged. Scars mark over his body, history recorded. Men are lucky like that, she thinks — the violence both they and the world has visited upon them leaves behind an indelible reminder.

Ada takes the cigarette from him. One pull, and then she stubs it out. “What now? Am I meant to pat you down then? Cavity search?”

His mouth twitches but the rest of his face remains challenging and cold. Removed. There’s no humiliation in this for him. That much is clear. Instead, he is humiliating her. Again.

She snaps. She doesn’t think. She gives in to that relentless drive within her to do something, anything, with all that untouched, untapped fury.

Ada slaps him, hard, across the face. The impact is loud; her hand stings with it, and his head whips to the side. The surprise is mutual between them — he had not expected this from her. She can tell from the sidelong look he affords her. Truthfully, neither did she. She watches him take a breath in, his nostrils flaring, and she does the same. Tommy keeps his arms extended and he keeps his balance. With a long heavy exhale, he brings his head back up, standing tall before her. He stands as if waiting for more. So she obliges. She slaps him, again. Again. She loses herself momentarily to her own rage, seeing nothing but red. She hits him harder, her own breath whistling noisily through her teeth.

By the fifth time she does it, he’s panting. She glances down. His chest is flushed, his cock half-hard against his bare thigh. The image of that, of him, like this — his arms still extended, his body swaying, tensed and primed — takes some of the fury out of her, replaced instead by a different heat. Ada trusts that even less. She reaches and she slaps him lightly this time. She leaves her hand behind, all but cupping his reddened cheek, the heat of it against her stinging palm. She goes to pull back, but he grabs her wrist. She meets his eye and she is unsure what she is seeing. Tommy pulls her hand from his cheek to his mouth. His mouth parts open and wet, his tongue laving against her palm, filthy in its suggestiveness. All of her feels clutched up tight, hot. She weakly pulls but his grip only tightens, painfully, the bones of her wrist grinding beneath it. He bites her then, hard, his blunt teeth sinking into the meat of her hand between thumb and first finger. Ada gasps, noisy in the quiet room, this quiet house, and the sound bleeds into the start of a moan. Tommy’s eyes stay fixed on her the entire time. She yanks her hand back, and he lets her — she knows that much, she’s not that foolish: he let her — and she steps back away from him.

“Get dressed,” she hears herself spit out, her voice both too high and too low, stretched thin and quaking. Her palm is still wet with his spit, where he bit pulsing and aching, and she cradles her hand as if injured. She takes a deep breath and she makes for the door. All of her is pulsing and aching. 

“What was the favor?” she asks. She faces the door, her back to him.

Behind her, Tommy sounds as if he might laugh. “Another time,” he says. She leaves; she refuses to stay in that room a moment longer. She tells herself his voice was winded, strained. She does not ask herself why that could possibly matter to her.

Ada goes to her room. Her room, his house, her bed, his house. She falls onto it, facedown, on her stomach. She does not think; she cannot stop thinking about what she did. What he did. She fits the hand he licked and bit down between her legs. She sighs like she means to cry when she touches herself. She’s wet there, too.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada is drunk. Tommy finds her on the sofa in his study. There are two open bottles of wine on the table before her. Her cheeks are flushed and her mouth red, her body sunk into both the sofa and the warmth that comes with too much drink. She catches the small quirk of Tommy’s brow as he considers the scene, the cursory glance he affords her. 

It’s been near a month since what Ada has come to refer to as the odd occurrence in his study. Neither he nor she has mentioned it, and nothing of the sort has happened since. Instead, she does his bidding, with both Shelby Company Ltd. and with his campaign. He grants her a wide berth, trusting her judgment, even if he never outright says as much.

She nods towards the wine. “Frances told me no one’d been in the wine cellar since.” She cuts herself off quickly, feeling loose-lipped and silly. Since Grace, of course. They do not speak her name, or at least she doesn’t and neither does Tommy. There are photographs of her throughout the house though. Charlie likes to look at them, same as her own son had liked to consider the faded picture books she gave him to read.

Tommy picks up one of the bottles from the table and looks at the label. “I paid a small fortune for that,” he says.

He puts the bottle down and retreats behind his desk. Ada has come to think of the way they behave with each other in military terms. Retreat and advance. Parry and flank. Collateral and surrender. 

“Bill me. I’ll reimburse you.”

“From the salary I pay you? Too much paperwork for the same result.”

She says nothing to that. He has moved on from her, busying himself at his desk. He’s home early, as compared to the nights he spends away from the estate. She knows from Lizzie of the paid women who bide his time and bed at the club. On those nights, Ada does not see him.

“Who was it tonight?” she asks. She doesn’t look at him, but she can hear him. First, the flick of his lighter, then, that exhausted lusty initial inhale. 

“Who?”

“Yes, you fucking owl. Who.”

All his women are alike. Paid or for free. A parade of sharp-jawed dark-haired women, wide-eyed yet rightfully suspicious, their cutting mouths and clean profiles. Thinking they’re the ones to make an honest man of Thomas Shelby. 

“They all look the same,” Ada says lazily, the conversation continued privately in her head without him. She bends her knee and shifts into the arm of the sofa. 

“The same as who?” She catches that, the tight way he asks it. Like maybe he is afraid of her answer. Like maybe frightening him is ever a possibility.

Ada looks at him dead-on with her wide eyes. Pointy chin and mussed dark hair, her mean mouth says, “Each other.”

Tommy is studying her. She decides she does not care what he sees. “You didn’t have to wait up for me, you know,” he says.

“I know. I didn’t.” She lifts her glass. “I was having a drink.”

“You’re drunk,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “I am. Very much so.”

“Jessie. I was with Jessie.”

Ada laughs, the sound humorless, like broken glass. “Have you gone and fucked her into submission yet?” she asks.

Everything about him is careful, slow-moving, as he rolls his neck to consider her. “She’s very idealistic.” It’s a non-answer, which is the same as him saying, _not yet_.

“Is that another word for romantic?” She likes the idea of this girl making Tommy work for it.

“No.” He looks away from her. “She believes me to be better than I am.”

This is an invitation, she knows, for her to tell him he is better than he knows. Than he is. She rolls her eyes. She’s too tired, too drunk, for this. It’s always a game with Tommy. Even with Grace, even if he won’t ever admit to it. She does not believe Tommy has ever genuinely cared for anyone, not even himself. He takes those he will claim he loves and he will use them as cannon fodder while swearing up and down the guns will not fire. He’s right most of the time. But most of the time is not nearly often enough when it is the lives of those you love you play as gambling chips. 

“How incredibly unlucky for the both of you,” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

“How’s Karl?”

Ada puts down her grapefruit spoon and looks down the long dining room table at Tommy. The early morning light glints off the glossy wood.

“You now, you only ever ask me about my son when you aim to insult me as a mother.” It’s true: he only mentions Karl, only ever mentions Freddie, when he wants to test to see if he can still slot the blade between her ribs.

Tommy tips his head back, his mouth curving up. He hides it with his hand, his lit cigarette. Breakfast for him is a cigarette and a carafe of strong coffee, the morning’s papers scattered around him. “How is Karl?” he asks again.

“He’s well,” she says, each word icy with precision. “He likes his school.”

Tommy exhales. “Should’ve known the spawn of Freddie Thorne would grow up into an egghead.”

Ada does not reply. The quiet accumulates between them and she lets it. Tommy returns to his papers and Ada to her breakfast, and she knows, each passing day more certain of it. Her son will grow up free from the influence of Tommy Shelby.

 

 

 

 

 

“Let me tell you about your cousin Karl,” she says to Charlie. She has him held in her lap, his bedroom warm and safe. She brushes his hair off of his forehead. She tells him about her son, so clever and bright and so very far away. “It’s very difficult to be away from the people you love,” she tells him. 

“Mother?” Charlie says, and Ada is at a loss. She had never known Grace in any real way. The only way she had known her was as an extension of Tommy. It worries her that she is or she will come to be viewed similarly. Fuck it — it already is like that: _This is Ada, Tommy’s sister_.

“Your mother was very beautiful,” she hears herself saying. “And brave. And your father loved her very much.”

 

 

 

 

 

“You are good. You will seek only goodness in this world. You will be kind. You have my love.”

She still whispers it to Charlie on the nights she puts him down. She kisses his forehead, and it’s when she turns from the boy to leave that she sees Tommy. He is standing in the doorway, silent. She can tell by the cast to his face he has heard her. Ada swallows. She pulls the door closed behind her as they step out into the hall. 

Tommy’s drunk, she can see that now. She can smell it on him. Whiskey, not gin. There is a forced inevitability as she follows him into his study.

He turns to face her, his eyes unfocused and wet. He holds his arms wide and open and nods towards her, submission writ across his body. He all but says, “I am at your command.”

“Tommy,” she says.

“You have to say it,” he says.

“What?”

“You have to tell me what to do.”

“Why would I … ” she trails off. He’s drunk and he’s hungry for something she’s afraid to give.

“Are you going to pretend you didn’t enjoy it?” She goes cold.

“Stop talking,” she hisses.

He grins, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He nods. “Yes. Like that.”

She pushes past him and pours herself a drink from the bar cart beside his desk. Gin. The taste is medicinal and sickening. This was not supposed to happen again between them. She pours herself more. 

When she turns back to him, he still hasn’t moved. “Now’s the part when you tell me to take off my clothes.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Plenty, I’m told.”

It’s another fucking game with him. He’s decided to use her as penance. Fine. “I thought I told you to stop talking,” she says. His eyes glint. He can have what he fucking wants; he always gets it in the end. Why delay the inevitable. 

“Strip,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

He does. He is less coordinated this time. She blames the drink. The waiting look he gives her, tinged by just enough anxious hunger, unsettles her. She understands it now: she wants her to hit him again. Shame wells up in her, colored by something uglier and even less governable. She won’t touch him, she decides. She won’t let him touch her either. 

“Kneel.”

He obeys. He takes to his knees in the center of the room and he stays there, unmoving. Drunk as he is, that hard, challenging light doesn’t leave his eyes. Like he now knows something terrible about her that she does not. 

Or maybe she does know. She likes the power. She likes the illusion of it, because she knows: Tommy would never do anything he didn’t already want. And maybe that’s the more intriguing angle to chase down. Why does he want this from her? It’s a punishment, she knows, but she wants to know what he’s done to earn it and what she has earned in kind.

He’ll show her eventually. She can trust that. 

“Enough,” she says. “Get up.” But he doesn’t move. He remains still, his chest rising and falling too rapidly. A quiet fear creeps through her as she recognizes that lack of control in him, that he’s lost himself in the drink again.

She stands over him, and Tommy looks up at her, baleful. Near begging. The wrongness of it clangs within her. There’s power, and then there’s this. 

“Ada, please,” he says, quiet enough she can almost pretend he didn’t say it. 

He wraps his arms around her waist. He pulls her to him and he presses his face against her middle. “Tell me,” he says, the sound muffled against her. “Tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Her words are shaky. She isn’t touching him.

“What you told him. Tell me.” His voice is thick, like he is to cry or he has a mouthful of blood.

Ada’s hands tremble as she disobeys herself. She brushes his hair back, her fingertips drifting over his scalp. It’s the worst kind of lie, she thinks, to say this to him. Superstitiously she wonders if this unmakes all the progress she had wanted to believe she could make with Charlie. But she will do it anyway; she has never known how to resist Tommy. She always caves.

As she does with his son, she bends down and she presses her mouth against his temple. “You are good,” she whispers. She rubs the pad of her thumb over the scar on his cheek. “You will seek only goodness in this world. You will be kind. You have my love.” She always fucking caves.

 

 

 

 

 

Lizzie has the baby. Polly was right: it’s a girl. Lizzie names her Ruby, and Polly was right about that, too. 

“That baby,” Ada tells Polly, “was the last fucking thing he needed.” She has a stack of leaflets advertising Tommy’s name beneath a heading that simply reads _WORKERS!_ Jessie had written the copy, after no small amount of groveling from Ada. She hands them off to Finn with the directive, “All of them gone, understood?” and Finn nods. 

“He knows it,” Polly says after Finn leaves. Ada can feel Polly’s full attention on her now, so she keeps her head bowed, double-checking the columns of figures of the past month’s American haul.

“When do you plan to return to Boston?” Polly asks the question too casually for it to be as toothless as it’s meant to sound. 

Ada quirks a brow. “I’ve worn out my welcome then, is that it?”

“Of course not, my love.” Polly does not elaborate. Perhaps it’s the quiet that raises Ada’s defenses, or it’s simply Polly. All-knowing Polly. She’ll look at you like she can see straight through to the bones and the dreck. 

"I seem to recall it was you who suggested I stay in the first place."

"That was quite awhile ago now."

Ada stands up straight. “You know Tommy wants me to stay. He needs my help. With the campaign.”

“Of course,” Polly says again.

 

 

 

 

 

Lizzie brings Ruby by not long after. Tommy is out again, glad-handing, a new fixture among the old and powerful. He’s always been gifted at manipulating and charming, but as Jessie had known to ask, it’s the genuine part that’s tricky. Like trying to make snake oil burn clean, Ada thinks. 

“Well, hello there,” Ada says. She reaches a finger out and Ruby reaches to grip it. Lizzie pulls the baby back from her.

“You told Tommy I was coming by?”

Ada sighs. “I did. But it’s a critical time in the campaign, and his appointments must be kept.” She had not told him. She knew the answer and she did not see the point in inserting herself between the two of them. Lizzie could tend to her own mistakes. “Tea?”

Lizzie ignores the question. “You don’t have to make this harder than it is for me, Ada.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.” Ada takes a sip of her tea. Lizzie’s face is sharp and watchful. She has always been smarter than any man has wanted to give her credit. She doesn’t trust Ada. That much is apparent. 

“You can’t keep him from me. From his child.”

“You of all people should know there is no one about who could keep Tommy away from that which he wants.”

Lizzie’s mouth goes flat and hard. “Is it for yourself that you long to keep him?”

There it is: that cold rubber band snap in Ada’s chest. Ada takes a careful sip of her tea then sets it down on the table between them. She rearranges her skirt about her knees then crosses her legs. She can feel that same manic energy beating its way up and through her. She can picture Tommy’s reddened cheek under his hand, the lean of his body impossibly towards and away from her at the same time. Tommy on his knees, broken. Begging. All the terrible ways that she has come to know him that Lizzie couldn’t even begin to imagine. That she has no right to even try.

“He isn’t going to marry you,” Ada says. Crisp, impersonal. All business. “And I would never be able to convince him otherwise.”

“And why would you want to?” Lizzie hisses. “You’re his wife in all but name and the fucking, aren’t you?”

Ada blinks; it’s all she outwardly gives her. “You go on ahead thinking that foolishness and I will grant you but this one time not to take it personally. Now, please, the tea is getting cold.”

 

 

 

 

 

She waits up for Tommy that night. She cannot get the way that Lizzie had looked at her out of her head. The disgust and the envy. 

Tommy comes home tired, but he stinks of cigars instead of cheap women’s perfume. “A successful outing, I gather?” she says. 

He replies, something about more backers to his name, but she isn’t listening. There’s a distant buzzing in her ears, the high tide swell of her own pulse overwhelming her. 

“Are you listening to me?” he says.

“Take off your clothes,” she says. 

It fascinates her. She can't find the source of it, but at the command, it’s like something switches on behind Tommy’s eyes. His body changes. He holds himself like a man headed if not into battle then to be thrown down a gauntlet only he deserves. There’s never a speck of fear to be found in him, only trust and apprehension. Anticipation. But Ada wants to know what it is that does it. She wants to find the source of that power. Is it in the words she says? The way she says it — low and monotone, an attempt to disguise her own role in this? Or is it simply that it’s her and that it’s him and the only way for Tommy Shelby to lose a scrap of his control is to cede it to someone else. Someone like her.

Tommy doesn’t say a word in reply, but he does undress. His body bared to her is becoming familiar and that frightens her. Not enough to stop, though.

“Kneel,” she says. He does. 

She circles him — predator and prey, or vulture and carrion. The rush of power is intoxicating, and even if she distrusts it, she leans into it. She’s frightened of what it draws from her. It's as if she loses herself in it. 

“It’s unfair, you know. The way you hurt all of us around you.” Tommy doesn't say anything. His head is almost bowed, like some sick bastardization of confession or martyrdom. She’s unsure when anger became synonymous with hunger inside of her, but there is an appetite yawning wide and red at the center of her now. “I can never decide which would be worse: that it’s intentional or that you simply just do not care.”

She steps closer to him. He’s breathing hard. She bites down on a gasp as she realizes it: he’s waiting for her to hurt him. He wants his pain to be intentional. He wants his pain from her. She snatches a letter opener off his desk as she passes.

“Stand up,” she says. He does. 

For all his intimidation, Tommy is not very tall. It’s too easy to meet his eye as she stands in front of him. His gaze drifts down to the letter opener in her hand, and when he exhales, everything about him aches with eagerness. “I prefer to think you mean it,” she says, finding menace as easy as looking him in the eye. “I’d like to believe you at the least think of me when you hurt me.”

“Ada,” he says. The syllables of her name twist broken and wrong in his mouth. She could make him beg. She thinks he is already almost there. She doesn’t think either of them have any idea what he would even beg her for. 

She lifts the letter opener and scrapes it down his arm, light enough she does not break the skin. He shivers only once. When she brings the blade to his throat, he does not react at all. Tommy never reacts to direct threats of violence. She has always known that about him. Tommy is at his calmest with a gun aimed at his face.

She brings the tip of the letter opener down, traces it over the jut of his collarbone. She increases the pressure, curious, and blood wells up. Tommy doesn't wince, but he makes a quiet low sound when the blood starts to drip, tiny dark beads of red, down his chest. Ada’s hands shake, the violence in her quelled, disgust filling the void now instead. 

Tommy doesn’t say a word. And she doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t understand what it is he thinks he’s giving her, why he would want to give it. 

Ada steps back from him and Tommy watches her retreat. He’s hard, the curve of his cock jutting thick and obscene. Her cunt clenches, empty and wet. She drops the letter opener noiselessly onto the carpet. She’s not meant to know this much about Tommy. It’s wrong to know this much of him. But he is giving her that, too. Or — no, he is taking. He is always taking, and this is what he leaves her with.

It would be wrong to want more.

 

 

 

 

 

“You were always his fucking favorite,” John said.

“That was solely a function of femininity,” Ada said. John looked back at her blankly. “I was the only girl. And don’t you know, we need protecting.” She let the sarcasm drip, but John was already shaking his head.

“Nah, it was never just that. Out of all’s us, it was you. Only one he’d treat close to his equal and all that.”

“Don’t insult me so, John. It’s Christmas.”

 

 

 

 

 

“What's a pretty thing like you doing at a joint like this?”

Ada looks around; this is the exact place a pretty thing would wind up, she thinks. It’s a house party, held in Tommy’s honor held by one of the lesser landed lords who only a few months ago, Ada is sure, would have rather resigned from public life entirely than be seen with the likes of Thomas Shelby. She has come to learn that this is a large part of the campaign process: wealthy homes occupied by frothy people who claim to care about the poor while doing very little in the form of aid. 

Ada has been flirting with the man at her elbow for most of the evening. Out of boredom and out of something that feels a lot like spite. He isn’t bad-looking. He’s handsome, or he would be, without the mustache that serves as affectation rather than masculine statement. Ada makes for a poor flirt. The only way she has ever known how to get a man’s attentions, affections, or his cock is through bullish demand. She’s never seen a point in playing coy when you’re hungry. An appetite isn’t fed through graceful hints and batted eyelashes. 

“I like loud parties,” she says to the gentleman. She lets her eyes rest on Tommy across the room; he is mid-conversation but he has been watching her the entire time. She blinks and smiles up at the stranger’s face. Ada does not like loud parties, but since this man does not know — or he is pretending not to know, and maybe that’s the same thing, maybe there isn’t a goddamn difference — who Ada Shelby is or who Ada Thorne is, she can pretend, too. She can be somebody else. A pretty thing who likes loud parties. 

She fucks him, unable to remember the name he gave her, in the ornate powder room down the hall. The disapproval of a long-dead ancestor clad in a layered ruff glares down at their reflection in the heavy gilt-framed mirror. It’s the sort of ancestor who never could have sired a family like the Shelbys. The fine fucking portraiture only started for them with Tommy. 

The sex is unsatisfying, even though he does make her come. Ada had foolishly thought that this would serve as an exorcism of sorts; instead, she aches. As this stranger pulls away from her, there is a curious sense of loss within her. A small hole that merely grows larger, the raw edges of it tearing open wider and wider. 

Behind her, she hears him laugh. There’s no mirth in the sound, and she turns over her shoulder. 

“Glad to know the Shelby whore lives up to her name.” He sneers it as if it wasn’t his own cock that had been inside of her a moment before. 

The surprise that he knew who she was is dwarfed by the surprise she feels at her own lack of shame. There’s no anger in her either. Instead, there’s a numbness she finds as exhausting and peculiar as the hole inside of her.

“Didn’t charge you now, did I?” she snaps. She has lipstick smeared off her mouth, her chin reddened with it, his chin as well. She turns back from him and runs the tap. She cleans her mouth as he leaves, the taste of his sticking to her tongue like chalk, and the door shuts sharply with his departure. 

Ada’s hands tremble as she attends to her face and she does not like that. She is a woman who demands a solid grip. What had she wanted to achieve here? It all seems so tawdry and sad to her now. Fuck a stranger at a party, tell yourself this is all you want. All you need. That there’s nothing broken and wrong in you. That there’s nothing he (don’t say his name, don’t even think it) could do to fix you. Break you even more. It’s funny how that works — the cure so often worse than the disease.

She is halfway through reapplying her lipstick when there is a knock at the door, a tentative jiggle of the doorknob.

“It’s occupied,” she says.

The door opens anyway. Tommy. Fucking Tommy. Ada puts down her lipstick, only one half of her bottom lip coated in bright red, and she scowls at him. 

He shuts the door behind him. He is looking at her strange, she thinks. Knowing. She presses back against the sink, as if attempting to achieve as much distance between them as possible.

“Were you listening?” she asks, aiming for caustic and landing somewhere just shy. 

“Hard not to. You’re loud.”

“It’s easier if you don't skulk around outside closed doors.” She pictures Tommy, pressed against the door like an anxious cuckold, straining to hear. The thought does something odd to her heart, makes it feel as if it is opening and closing rapidly and repeatedly. 

“Are you always that noisy?” He asks it casually, like they could be talking about anything. 

“Fuck off, Tommy.”

She turns back to the mirror. “I’m just curious,” he is saying, and then he pauses. Ada watches him approach in the mirror.

"About what?” she asks, against her better judgment. The words sound as exhausted as she finds she feels. Tommy is behind her now. He could touch her, if he wanted. She can’t decide if she wants him to touch her. 

“If you’re always that noisy, once you’ve got a cock in you.”

She exhales the start of an incredulous laugh. He wants a reaction out of her. She’s still wet between her legs, used. She feels her cunt throb now though, more desperate than she had felt bent over that sink, panting. 

“Depends on the cock,” she says, voice steady enough.

Tommy is at her side now. He reaches and rests his thumb against her bottom lip. She flinches when he touches her but she doesn’t move from him. He smears her lipstick with his thumb to coat her bottom lip fully. Her lips part, the blunt edge of her teeth testing his thumb. 

“I can smell him on you,” he says. Low. Threatening. She swats his hand away, presses her lips together.

“Good,” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

Tommy finds her alone in a bar, three days later. It’s a small, classy establishment, unlike anything they ever had in Small Heath. Tommy silently takes a seat next to her. It’s late afternoon, the day bleeding into early evening, winter dusk, gray and cold. Ada is on her third drink. 

Tommy lifts her glass and she just as quickly, if not clumsily, takes the glass back. 

“You’ve started early,” he says. He flags down the bartender. Ada glances up at the bar — the bottle shelved like jewels, glittering in the low light.

“You should open a bar like this,” she says. 

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“Name it The Ada and refuse any man entrance.”

“That’s clever, Ada.”

She says nothing in reply. She throws back the rest of her drink and winces at the burn. 

Ada had spent much of the time she was living in Boston in New York. She met a man she dated briefly in the city. His name was Peter. He served her red wine and it stained her mouth and teeth. He was American through and through: he talked openly of money and ambition and his parents, immigrants from Russia, all of this, without shame. 

“You interest me greatly,” he had told her, with an earnestness no man had shown her since Freddie, before he had married her. Marriage had shucked that off of him, or she had. Or Tommy. 

Because that was the great novelty of this American — Tommy did not know him. For once, she was completely alone with a man. 

“You own nothing of me,” she says to Tommy now, vicious and sudden. His face is vicious in kind, coiled tight like a snake before the strike. 

“I’d ask you to take a look, Ada. Look at the clothes that you wear. At the salary you keep. The school that Karl attends. I’d ask you to recall that nothing is cheap and that even less is for free. This life you’ve come to live? I own that. And if that’s not the same fucking thing then I ask you to clarify it.”

His words sober her. They crystalize him before her; she sees him for what he is.

“You don’t want me to clarify it, Tommy. You don’t want me to say it out loud.”

“Say what?” He’s testing her, as if they are both seated together on the same fault line and he wishes her to be the one to trigger it. It's always a test with him. A game, pushing each other’s limits, and she’s lost sight of what she hopes to gain from any of it. She doesn’t dare try to understand anymore what he could want from her. Or, no — perhaps he truly does not understand himself and she has been operating from a faulty principle. She never thinks of him that way when it comes to her, the blind trust that she so blithely throws at his feet same as any child would at a parent. That he knows himself and he knows what he is doing even if he has proven the opposite time and time again. She can see him so clearly in any situation that does not pertain to her. From the moment he undressed before her, he has had no idea what he is doing.

“You may own the trappings of my life, the beautiful box you try and you try to keep me in, but,” and she pauses, unsure how to say what means. “There will always be a part of me you cannot touch. You cannot have, and you hate me for that, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate you, Ada.”

“You will if I clarify it for you.”

“What?” His face is stern, ungiving, but the question is genuine.

Ada rises from the bar stool. She leaves cash out on the bar. She stands there at Tommy’s side, and she leans in towards him. 

“You can’t fuck me,” she says. 

Darkness flashes quicksilver over Tommy’s face and he grabs her by the arm just as fast. He tips his face up towards hers. “And how you wish I would,” he says.

 

 

 

 

 

“He’s manipulative. It’s monstrous,” Ada spat out. It was years ago. It was Freddie, it was London, it was the grip of the Shelby family that always found her and grabbed her by the back of the neck. It was always Tommy’s hand. 

Polly did not react at first. She watched Ada with that face of hers you never could hide anything from. Tommy had a face like that, too. Inherited or cultivated: Ada would like to know. 

Polly sighed then. She leaned forward to press her cigarette into ash in the center of the daintily-painted porcelain plate at Ada’s elbow.

“Yes. He is. But, my. How he gets results.”

 

 

 

 

 

Ada goes to Jessie’s flat that night, still drunk, but not nearly enough.

“If you’re here to plead your brother’s case, I’d rather not. But my thanks all the same.”

“I do have a life outside of serving as his errand girl.”

“And that would make your purpose here what exactly?”

Ada shrugs. “Fine company,” she says. “And I brought a bottle of whiskey.”

Despite Jessie’s claims to the contrary, once she has some drink in her the conversation turns back to Tommy. 

“‘Your cause is my cause now.’ That’s what he said to me, you know.”

“Of course he did.” Ada sighs. She reaches for her glass, finds it empty. She reaches for the bottle instead. “There’s nothing there. Surely you’ve seen that by now.”

A crease forms between Jessie’s eyebrows, not quite a frown. “How do you mean?”

“He’s empty. He’ll let you fill him with what you want but that doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s not real. He isn’t real.” Ada is drunk. 

“He was real enough to me,” Jessie says softly, looking down into her glass. So, he’s thrown her off then, Ada thinks.

“Yes. Well. They’ve all said that one.”

“All?” she says, disappointed, and Ada finds it disappointing. She wants Jessie to be better than that. Better than the rest of them.

“Yes, Jessie. All.” Ada leans towards her. “No girl likes to hear it, but you’re hardly the first. Nor most like the last. He’s empty.” 

“Fuck off,” but Jessie says it reflexively, with the hurt that comes with rejection. 

It’s easy then, to kiss her.

Jessie surprises her. Ada had thought her mouth on hers would unsettle her, but based on the smile Jessie hides against Ada’s lips she had expected this. Goes to show, Ada thinks. She doesn’t know a thing about this girl, not really. 

The whiskey on Jessie’s lips make her own buzz, so she opens her mouth wider, tastes her deeper. 

Jessie’s body is warm but flighty against her own, constantly in motion, curious and searching. Ada lets her. Her hands are small on Ada’s body and even with three fingers tucked wet inside of her, it’s not enough. She pulls at Jessie’s hair when she gets her mouth against hers again, and when she whispers, “More,” it’s Jessie who groans. 

The taste of Jessie’s cunt is bitter and drips down her chin. Ada licks and she sucks at her, wetter from this than with Jessie’s fingers inside her. She knows that Tommy has been here, too. It’s terrible, it’s unjust, that even here she thinks of him. That even here she thinks of what’s fair and what isn’t. That the fulcrum of that always seems to rest, trapped, under Tommy’s weight. 

She wants to know. That’s what it’s come down to. She wants to know, if only secondhand and if only for one night, what it feels like to be Thomas Shelby. To take and to take and to take and to take, anything and everything you have decided should be rightfully yours. Take what’s offered, and then take the rest. 

Jessie whimpers when she comes.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessie isn’t the first woman that Ada has fucked. While living in Boston, she would go down to New York for more than just men. Tommy was right: Ada liked the lipstick and she liked the imported silk from Paris and she liked the fur coats she bought for herself with Shelby money. She also found she liked the feel of another girl’s stockings unfurling under her curious hands. The girls in New York, outside the supper clubs and in the night clubs, were all loose hands and waxy mouths that left behind a trail of red on soft, perfumed skin.

Ada had never thought of women like that before. She called it a distraction. Most things are, she knows. A distraction from the source of the money and a distraction from her loneliness. From the dark things she knew lived inside of her. When she started to think like that, she missed Freddie. She made herself believe that everything since his death had been merely that: a distraction. She knows that isn’t the truth. The sentimentality of it rings false and empty, especially when considered in the wake of all the times she has managed to feel brighter and more alive than Freddie could ever make her.

 

 

 

 

 

“Ada!” She blinks as she looks up from the page. “Ada!” Tommy shouts again. The slam of the heavy front door echoes. She pinches the bridge of her nose and she sighs. 

“Your son is asleep,” she hisses when she meets him in the hall.

“Come with me,” he says. He is looking at her strange, she thinks. He’s drunk, certainly, filthy with it. He reaches as if to touch her arm but then decides better of it. “I’d have a word.” The odd formalness of the request leaves her intrigued despite her better judgment. 

She follows him into his study, trepidation creeping over her. She shuts the door behind her while Tommy heads straight for the bar cart. He pours himself a drink. He offers her nothing. She listens to the self-satisfied smack of his lips after he swallows, watches as he turns back to face her.

“I’ve just been with a mutual friend of ours.”

Ada crosses her arms over chest and wanders over to the sofa. She takes a seat. Tommy remains standing, pacing. He has refilled his glass. 

“Even though we have so few, I’ll need a name,” she says.

“Jessie Eden.”

“Oh. Her.” A faint alarm is trilling within her. It’s been weeks since Ada last saw Jessie. Ada and Tommy had found a space to coexist within their mounting antipathy, if that can possibly be the word for all that has transpired between them. But Ada should have known: not a truce, but a pause. 

“Yes. Her.” Tommy takes a seat behind his desk, his entire body heavy and tired, she can see that much from here. “You know what she said to me.”

“I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess. Workers of the world unite, perhaps?”

“I don’t find you amusing,” he snaps.

“Nor I you.” She takes a steadying breath. “Out with it then.”

“She said you fucked her.” Ada’s blood goes cold at that. She didn’t think Jessie had it in her. It almost makes her like the girl that much more. “And here I was, standing there with her, thinking she’s just being colorful, yeah? A turn of phrase. That you went and let her down when it came to me — ”

“Because it's always about you, Tom,” she interrupts.

He slams his fist down on his desk. “I am speaking!” He’s in a rage now. But what Tommy fails to understand is that his temper loses its impact when you’ve endured it as many times as any member of the Shelby family has in the past. It’s the quiet that frightens her more. He leans back in his chair then, his chest expanding as he breathes deep. “You fucked her,” he says, quiet, as if to himself. His eyes fix on her though and Ada doesn’t move. “You eat cunt now, that it, Ada?”

“You don’t need to be so vulgar.”

“And what of the man at the party? You still like cock, too?”

Ada laughs, mean-spirited. “Christ, Tommy. I can enjoy both as I please.”

“I send you to Boston and this is how you come back to me.”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“Of course it fucking does!”

"I'm not yours!" she shouts. Tommy freezes. Ada shakes her head. “You can’t imagine a world you’re not the center of, can you?” He says nothing. “You think me greatly changed? Tommy, I haven’t changed. I’m a Shelby, through and through. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? You spent so long trying to get that through my head. My entire life. I can see it now. I am just like the rest of you. I see an opportunity and I take it. I exploit it. I get what I want. Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that all you’ve ever done?”

“It’s not the same.”

“No,” she says, dry as bone. “Of course not. Tommy fucking Shelby can take as many cunts as he wants. Tommy can do as he pleases. But, Ada.” She stops. Her hands are damp with sweat when she presses them to her thighs. She stands. No one has ever known how to complete the thought when it comes to her.

“I have more use than to be used.”

“I know that,” he says.

She doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t question him. She doesn’t see a point. 

She stands in the middle of the room where he has stood, and like him, she holds her arms out and open. “Yes. I fucked her. No, I don’t know why. I wanted to, I suppose. I want a lot of things, Tommy. But then, you say you know what about me.” She pushes her hair off her face. “I’m tired,” she says, and she finds she is, well and truly. “Tomorrow I’ll head out, stay at Pol’s for a bit.” She turns to leave.

“No,” Tommy says when she is at the door. She glances back at him over her shoulder. He isn’t looking at her anymore but rather dead ahead, unseeing and determined. “You’ll stay here.”

A quiet fury that has lived too long around her heart clenches tight. She grips the doorknob. She keeps her voice even and light as she says, “Of course, Tommy.”

 

 

 

 

 

Ada seeks out Jessie at the next campaign function. 

“You told him,” Ada says.

Jessie meets her eye, brave, if only in a way she wants to believe she can become. Ada knows that feeling. She knows this girl. That, Ada couldn’t bring herself to tell Tommy, was why she fucked her. She knew her, she had been her, yet somehow she grew into Ada Shelby instead of Ada Thorne. What else do you do with the past other than fuck it?”

“I thought that was what you wanted,” Jessie says.

Ada’s mouth remains closed, but her lips tilt up into a small smile. “You’re out of your fucking depth,” she says, but not without a great deal of kindness.

 

 

 

 

It’s not long after that a smear campaign against Tommy surfaces in the papers. It’s hardly unexpected. What is though is Ada’s name appearing alongside his in the back gossip pages.  _ IMPROPRIETIES BETWEEN LABOUR FAVORITE THOMAS SHELBY AND ADA THORNE — HIS SISTER? _

“‘Improprieties?’” Ada repeats. And then, “oh.” They’re alleging he fucks her. She laughs, but she notices the leap at the hinge of Tommy’s jaw. 

“Of all done to you, all said, it’s this you can’t abide?” she says. She wouldn’t dare try to explain it to him; she wants to laugh again, relief blanketing her. 

“A year ago, no one would’ve come at me with this filth.” Ada shakes her head. Tommy still can’t bring himself to accept that politics made you both accountable and accessible to a public he has spent so long scorning.

“Ignore it, Tom.”

She glances down at the paper again. His name, her name. She finds an odd safety in it, something this dark, this fearfully close to the truth, splashed across the papers. A rumor that outlandish everyone will write it off for what it is: an attempt to sully his name. 

Tommy remains rigid beside her. He’s been that way since the fight in his study. He hasn’t mentioned the name Jessie Eden to her again and she is smart enough not to broach the subject herself. In fact, this is the most they have spoken to each other over the last week. Of all subjects, she ruefully thinks. 

“This doesn’t offend you?” he says to her, tight and controlled as ever. He’s looking at her, searching, though what for Ada couldn’t say. The truth, maybe. But that’s always been a malleable, easily bent and broken thing in his hands. 

“Of course not. It’s not true,” she says.

“No,” he says, slowly, his voice like the inward pull of a rope to tighten. Choke. “It’s not.”

 

 

 

 

Polly doesn’t mention the papers. Instead, she says to Ada, “I think it’s time you returned to Boston.”

Ada doesn’t like the weight of knowledge, heavy, in Polly’s voice, and she likes even less how her face has gone pitying, near kind. It’s wrong.

“I will,” Ada says, stubborn. “I plan to.”

“Sooner would be best.” Polly’s face gentles that much more. “You were meant to be a smarter girl than this, Ada.”

 

 

 

 

 

“Take off your clothes.”

Ada looks to him across the room — Tommy at his desk and Ada on the sofa. With the election approaching, they had reverted back to a more familiar territory, all business, as they worked alongside each other. She blinks now, surprised. 

“No,” she says. As offhand as his command. “That’s not how this works.” It’s the first time either of them has made any reference to what they do together. Her voice is tight, the wrongness of it, of them, amplified when said aloud.

“Take off your clothes,” Tommy says again, even-toned and all the more intimidating for it.

“No.”

“Tell me then,” he says. His voice has gone lower, raspier. 

She meets his eye. She feels pinned. Polly was right: she is meant to be smarter than this. Ada doesn’t let herself look away as she says it. “Take off your clothes.”

Tommy does. He obeys. He comes around his desk and he stands in the middle of the room. He undresses. 

“Don’t move a fucking muscle.” Her voice is shaking, but he obeys that, too. She wants to hurt him, but she has never known the best way how.

Ada approaches him. They’re a well-matched height. She wants to blame him for everything, but it’s Ada who lifts her hand and it’s Ada who pulls his hair, hard enough to make his scalp ache, liking the arch of his throat, the way his mouth parts open. It’s Ada who bites him, her teeth sinking into the long column of that pale throat. She bites hard, the same way he had bitten her hand. She bites and she sucks, her mouth traveling down to his shoulder. She presses her hand to his chest and she can feel the frantic beat of his heart. She curls her hand, her short fingernails nicking against his skin. Curls as if it’s possible to wrap that heart in her fist and squeeze, feel it as blood and muscle instead of the cold stone she believes it to be. She finds she wants to cry, out of anger or frustration or at the quiet, mounting horror at what he has managed to do to her, what she has done to herself. She passes her hands roughly over his body, as if she is searching him, her hands mean, scratching at him, pausing only when she gets back to his chest, his collarbone, the base of his neck.

He lets her. He lets her touch and bite and take. 

He lets her until he doesn’t. She brings her hands up to circle his throat, and finds that is the line she cannot cross: he reacts immediately, instinctively. He slaps her hands away and grabs her by her own throat. His grip isn’t all that tight, but it’s the feel of it, the pressure, the suddenness a violence all its own. His hand wraps so easily around her throat. Ada swallows hard. She grabs at his forearms.

“I said don’t move,” she says, her voice raspy, not her own. Their bodies are too close now, that careful distance she always worked to maintain between them gone. She can feel him now, hard against her hip, and it’s like her breath is stuck in her chest, trapped.

She covers the hand he has around her throat and she squeezes, just a little. Just enough. He takes the hint. Tommy chokes her, he shows her, an exhibit of all that violence in him, what he’s capable of doing. What he has done to others. She has never wanted to know; she has always wanted. He gives her an intimate display of it here, made small. Personal. 

She doesn’t mean to do it, but she presses her hips forward, against his. He hisses, then rolls his hips into her. He pushes his thumb against the base of her throat and her breath hisses out of her. His face is so close to hers; there’s nowhere to look but him. 

“I know what you do when you leave me here like this,” he says, and he pushes his hips, his cock, into her again. It’s too much. It’s too far. Ada can’t breathe. 

“Let go of me,” she snaps, wheezing, and he does. She backs away from him. “You don’t know anything,” she spits out. 

He doesn’t put his clothes back on. Naked, he stalks over and pours himself a drink. He throws it back in one gulp. Ada doesn’t move.

“I asked her, you know. Jessie. I asked her if you made her come.”

Ada’s face pales. “Shut the fuck up, Tommy.”

“If she made you.”

“Not another fucking word.” Her voice is barely audible.

Tommy turns to face her. He’s still hard. There’s a livid bite mark where his shoulder meets his neck. She should’ve tried to bite his fucking throat out. “Did she?”

“Yes,” she says. She takes a deep breath, spite hot and familiar as it rises in her chest. “Did you?”

For once, Ada catches him unaware. His face is open for the briefest of seconds before he closes it off again, that tight mask he wears. “When?” he asks.

“When you thought about me fucking her. Did it make you come.”

His chest hitches with the question. His eyes sear into her. He finishes his drink, slow, making her wait, and for such an impatient man he has no problem making others wait for him. 

He slams the empty glass down hard enough to crack it. “Yes,” he says.

“Show me.”

Tommy doesn’t move. Ada takes a seat on the sofa. She nods towards him.

“On your knees,” she says. “And fucking show me.”

Tommy bares his teeth as he does, a parody of a smile, and a quiet voice in the back of her head warns she’s only giving him what he wants. 

Despite that, Ada feels as if she has taken back a modicum of control. She wants him to feel shame for it, same as he made her feel, and maybe he does. She can see the tightness to his body, the flexing and bunching of his muscles, his mouth held harsh and tight, teeth gritted.

But he’s not afraid to look at her. His eyes don’t leave her as he palms his cock, runs his fingers over the leaking head. 

Or, Ada thinks, on a cresting, crushing tide of dread, he likes her watching. He doesn't just want a witness, he wants her. She crosses her legs, presses her thighs together, and Tommy, eagle-eyed as anything, even like this, spots it.

A low moan catches in his throat, his gaze snapping up from her legs to her face. He wants her to want this, too. He wants her wet and open. For that, she refuses to move another muscle. She exhales heavily. She holds herself rigid. She ignores the throbbing pulse that drips between her legs. She does not avert her eyes. Ada is breathing too loudly — Tommy is too, panting, sweating, the wet smack of his hand as he pulls at his cock. His stomach muscles flutter and he grunts. 

She wonders what he would do if she gave in. If she started touching herself. Her nipples are hard and ache under her dress. Slowly, carefully, she cups her own breast. She wonders if she could live with that: letting him see. 

“Jesus, fuck,” Tommy says, equal parts surprised gasp and snarl. She leaves her hand there, barely touching, and she slides her thighs together — frictionless, no relief. 

But Tommy is watching her. Tommy is always watching her. Tommy, bared to her and stripped down to this, his eyes are fixed on her as he comes.

 

 

 

 

 

When Ada thinks back on her marriage to Freddie, she finds she understands it less and less. It had been love, yes. But it had been more than that, too, more complicated than a marriage between two people in love had any right to be. It had been as if, in his own terrible way, the way where he was an eclipse, blocking out any light, anything good, Tommy was as much a part of it as her and Freddie. How do you forgive an interloper like him? She would think of him while in bed with Freddie, not with any desire but with a curdled kind of fear. Maybe it was that daring Tommy had dealt in his entire life — go ahead and do something about this — that had reached her, too. It didn’t help that Freddie spoke of Tommy constantly, as close to in love with another man as she had found men often did with each other and then went and called it a rivalry.So desperate for approval or respect. She hadn't seen that as clearly then as she does now. Freddie wanted to be Tommy’s equal, he wanted to measure up, while Tommy did not think of Freddie. He thought only of her. 

That, she supposes, was a kind of love, too.

 

 

 

 

 

Tommy wins the election. It’s a foregone conclusion, though one celebrated all the same. 

At his own victory party, Tommy has already started plotting his next move. She listens to him without hearing. Ada understands it, to a point. If he stops moving, then he is dead. It’s not anyone else who would catch him, but himself. 

Ada presses a glass of champagne into his hand. “Celebrate. Go join your son. Your daughter. Smile. Let them take your photograph.”

“Not you?” he says, looking straight ahead. When she doesn’t answer him, confused by the question, he glances down at her. “What if I’d rather join you?” There’s a dangerous undercurrent to how he asks it. 

“Not an option,” she snaps. “Go,” she says.

The election is over. It’s time for her to leave, too.

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s time I left for Boston, Tommy.”

He ignores her, and for but a moment Ada questions whether she actually said anything at all. But his shoulders have tensed and he has his hands flat on the table before him. He heard her.

He jerks his head to the side. “Frances, leave us.”

They both wait until the hear the door shut. Ada adjusts the cutlery before her, her breakfast cooled and untouched. Tommy still has not answered her. 

“Did you hear me, Tom?”

“Yes. I disagree.”

She folds her arms, well-aware how petulant a pose she strikes. If she is to spend her life asking Tommy for permission, then she will play the role of the discontent brat. 

“Have I not done everything you’ve asked of me? You ask me to stay through the election, and I stay. You ask me to live in this house, and I do. The election is over. You have no further need of me.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. He lifts his eyes to her and she blinks first. She looks away from him.

“Bring Karl here,” Tommy says. So magnanimous, as if he is making some great concession for her while ignoring what she wants. “You both can stay.”

“No,” she says, firm and unyielding.

“He’s one of us,” Tommy says, mean, intent to hurt. She slaps her hand down onto the table.

“He doesn’t have to be.”

Tommy’s face doesn’t go hard as she had expected it would, but instead he is showing her everything. Fury bleeding into shame into something too horrifying for her to look at straight-on. She thinks it might be a reflection of her own face. 

“Listen to you,” he says. “After everything. You still think you’re better than us.”

“No, Tommy. I think he is. I think he can be.”

“You think you’re better than me,” he says, continuing as if she had not spoken. “You think I don’t know what you are. But I do. I do, Ada. I know you. _I_ know you, I am the only one — ”

“Don’t you say another fucking word.”

When does it stop? That’s always been the question, and he has never been able to provide a convincing answer. All this time, she had thought it was Tommy drilling a hole into her life, into her, for only him to fill, but she can see it now: the opposite is true. There is an emptiness inside of him assigned solely to her.

“It’s time I leave,” she says. She can hear the ticking of the over-large grandfather clock in the corner of the room. She hates this house. She hates him. She loves him. She can no longer properly recognize the difference between the two. “And I shall, with or without your consent.”

She watches him change before her eyes — he’s adopted his outward, public persona. The cavalier posture belying the tension coiled beneath, the cold, flat reptilian cast to his face. Uncaring. Removed. 

“Go then,” he says.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada arranges her travel back to Boston. She leaves in five days time.

That night, she goes to his study. She wants to say she knows what she’s doing, but when it comes to this family and when it comes to Tommy, she always manages to get lost. 

She stands in front of his desk and waits for him to acknowledge her. He doesn’t. It’s childish; Tommy keeps his attention fixed on his cigarette and the papers before him. 

“I know you don’t wish me to go,” Ada says. His head darts up at that.

“You don’t need to apologize to me.” So goddamn condescending. 

“I wasn’t going to.”

He leans back in his chair, lifts his cigarette to his mouth. “Was there anything else?”

And here they are, she thinks. 

“Say it.” She can barely breathe the words. 

He knows what she’s asking. She watches that knowledge drop over his face, dark and heavy. 

“Take off your clothes,” he says.

And she does. 

She doesn’t know who’s punishing who anymore. If it’s even about that now. If it ever was. They crossed a line, or there was never a line, not for people like them, and here she is, naked in front of Tommy. 

His eyes roam over her as he approaches her. He comes to her. He looks down into her face, expectant. It makes something catch and stick inside of her, a pick jammed into a lock. Her heart hammers. 

He touches her shoulders first, and then he presses his hand down her bare, shivering arms. He touches her entire body, mimicking as she had done to him, but without the mockery. Instead, he is thick with purpose and intent. His hands touch every inch of her, stopping, at last, between her legs.

His fingers are thick and rough with her. At the first brush of them against her cunt, insistent and without hesitation, it’s too much. Her stomach hollows out and she makes a small, falling noise. He braces her with a hand on her hip and pushes two fingers deep. 

He doesn’t make it easy for her. His rhythm is merciless and demanding, and when he adds a third finger, her head tips forward and she mouths wetly at the shoulder of his shirt rather than make a sound. It's the fullness she’s been after, she thinks. It's good, it’s better than good, and worst of all, Tommy knows. He must know. His thumb finally rubs against her clit and she comes, her full weight pressed and grasping against him. 

Tommy’s hand climbs her body, from cunt to hip to the ladder of her ribs, the underside of her breast. Her throat. Her jaw. Her mouth. He pulls her face back to look at her. 

“I know,” he says softly. “I know.” His lips pass over her own in a cruel promise of a kiss. 

Ada can’t abide the emptiness. She needs more. “I know,” he said. She will let him take if this is what he’ll give:

He has her body bent between his and the arm of the sofa, the upholstery skidding under the backs of her bare thighs and his knees. His teeth knock her own. His cock is that much better, that much worse, inside of her. The raw animal cruelty that flashes over his face, drives his body into hers, is repulsive and seductive at the same time. 

Tommy’s mouth glances off her own. “Stay,” he says, and his hips twist violently. “Please. Ada, fucking stay. Stay.”

Ada snarls and bucks in his grasp, but he only holds her down. Fucks her deeper. Says it again: “Stay.”

That wild anger flares inside of her, the heat of it so intractably mixed with all that heady want. She was wrong: he takes too much and he will never offer enough in kind. In return for all the love she has given him, this is all he knows how to give: brutality and begging and his bitten mouth. She slaps him across the face when he tries to say it again. She does it again, liking how he’s speechless now. That when Tommy moans the sound is almost pretty. He's giving her that now too, all the noises he held back when he stood there, naked before her, and let her hit him. Let her try to hurt him. It’s the prettiest thing about him, better even than the heavy pout of his mouth and the sharp blades of his cheekbones, the inhuman brightness to his eyes. She goes to slap him again, but he grabs her tight by the jaw and he squeezes. She tightens around his cock and gasps, high and needy. 

“Please,” he murmurs, and her hand drags over his mouth, silencing him. He drops his head to her throat, his fingers mean as they grip her hip. Teeth harsh as they scrape her skin.

He has to know. She can't stay. She could never stay. Not after this.

 

 

 

 

 

TELL ME TO COME HOME AND I WILL LOVE ADA

It was the only telegram she sent him from Boston.

He did not reply.

 

 

 

 

 

Ada is to return to Boston. Her ship leaves that evening. 

She finds Tommy alone in his office. 

“Too much to expect a bon voyage from you before I leave?”

He crosses his office to her, his pace slow, hands jammed into his trouser pockets. “Bon voyage then.”

“This place is a bloody mess,” she says, and it is. All manner of disarray, old files and old boxes, as he packs up this chapter of his life to head into the next. 

“I should have you stay here. Manage things in my stead.” She smiles gently. She likes that he thinks he still has a say in where she will go and when. 

“Arthur will see to it just fine.”

“Says you.”

“You’re an MP now, Tommy.” The teasing tone of her voice falls off after she says his name. “Forget this violence. Forget the old ways.” She cups his face in her hands. “You will seek only goodness in this world,” she says, soft, barely loud enough to be heard. She watches his face close off and she knows she has lost him again. She is always losing him.

Ada drops her hands and she nods once towards him. He grabs for her as she makes to leave, her hand in his, and he clutches too tight. Too desperate. The victory is empty, as empty as that place inside of her. Yes, she thinks. She has succeeded. She has finally managed to hurt him. All it took was leaving him. 

“Tommy,” she says. 

“You have my love,” he says.

 

 

 

 


End file.
